James Ashley Morrison

International Relations

About Me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I specialise in international political economy.

Prior to my start at the LSE, I was an Assistant Professor at Middlebury College (2008-2013) and a fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University (2012-2013).

I have a Ph.D. in Political Science and a Master’s in History from Stanford University. I am also an alumnus of the University of Chicago (graduated 2003) and a member of Trinity College at Cambridge University (matriculated 2002).

My Trajectory

While I have always been interested in policy, I was originally trained as an historian. As an undergraduate at Chicago, I studied political and economic ideas and institutions in the British Empire and the early United States. I spent my fourth year abroad at Cambridge, where I wrote a second undergraduate thesis on John Locke’s mercantilist political economy. I then went to Stanford to pursue a PhD in history under Jack Rakove. I remained, however, unusually interested in the role international politics played in shaping and constraining seemingly “domestic” policies. At the same time, I became increasingly impressed with the sophisticated tools social scientists have developed to study these issues. So, halfway through my PhD program, I switched into political science.

These days, I study the role of ideas and intellectuals in foreign economic policy. Drawing on my background as an intellectual historian, I take the ideas at play seriously and go to lengths to ensure that I contextualise and develop them as well as an historian might. I am, however, ultimately interested in the ways in which these ideas--and the intellectuals who proffer them--interact with institutions and interests to shape policy. My research utilises both the methods of contemporary social science and historical analysis.